Jack Getze at Spinetingler Magazine confirmed that my story "The Colombian" will appear in their Fall or Winter issue.

My first version of this one was called "The King of Infinite Space." When a few friends gave me critiques, the common factor was that they all hated the title.  My inspiration was a line from Hamlet: "I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." I planned a story about a guy who makes an extreme sacrifice in order to exact revenge. It started and ended with policemen discussing an unidentified coma patient in a hospital. The central story was a flashblack that explained how the patient got there.

I renamed the story in a subsequent draft but kept the hospital scenes. When Jack responded to my submission, he recommended that I remove the framing story altogether. Now there's no coma patient "bounded in a nut shell," and the only remaining connection to Hamlet is the theme of revenge.

I was leery of the change at first, but very few writers have gotten better by ignoring an editor's advice. I toyed with a couple more drafts and became convinced. The hospital scenes weren't necessary. The real story was all in the center.

Writing can take you in unexpected directions. A few years ago I was working on a novel called Relapse. The protagonist was a reformed criminal who returns to his hometown after the murder of a boyhood friend. Two of the minor characters were a scar-faced private detective and his girlfriend. They don't even get mentioned until the halfway mark. When I hit a block on the novel, I tried to get through it by working on something different. I wrote a short story about how the detective and his girlfriend met.

Plots with Guns published the result, "Beer Wine Snacks," in May 2003. I still write about that guy every now and then. Meanwhile, the first draft of Relapse is gathering well deserved cobwebs.

Following Jack's recommendations reminded me that sometimes the stories we try to write evolve into something different, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm glad to remember it.

Coincidentally, while I was browsing aimlessly around the web, I found a relevant quote from Nietzsche on Randy Wayne White's page of writing exercises: "The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak."